Hello crafty friends. Donna here, looking out the window at a rainy day and singing on the inside! I love rain! I have a set of slimline cards and a video for you today! These cards were simple to make, but I’m still in recovery mode after all the video editing. The more cards in the video, the harder I work at keeping it moving, so I think the footage may have nearly a thousand small clips of footage and Voiceover by the time I chopped everything up and put it back together again. Nobody wants to watch me twiddling my thumbs, or watch glue dry in real time, I’m sure!

The papers I chose were from a 12 x 12 set called Urban Garden from Paper Rose Studio. I used card sketches from Mojo Monday by Julee Tilman. Links to the Mojo Monday Sketches can be found on Julee Tilman’s blog here. From these sketches, I chose some that were marked as”Tall and Skinny”, which did a lot of the work for me, but my cards were taller and skinnier than the sketches, so I used my iPad to stretch the sketch and work out my measurements. You can see how I did that in the video below.

All but one of these cards were made using the sketches, but then I used the leftovers on my desk as the basis for my last card, creating my own sketch as I went. I used less than half the papers, leaving one of each of the sheets intact and having a fair amount of leftovers from the papers that I did cut into so you could easily make doubles of all these cards.

When making cards with paper /packs, here are a few things that Iike to keep in mind.

• choose some background plain, or almost plain papers and use them to add tiny border around each of the card elements. It stops the different patterned from looking too busy right next to each other. My border is usually 1/16″ (1.5mm) on each side. If these papers are either much darker, or much lighter than the patterned papers, they will work best
• keep all the elements level. Even the height of one sheet of paper can make the piece on top look wonky. Add pieces of scrap paper behind any parts of the elements that will droop.
• Measurements on sketches are great, but don’t get too attached to them. For example, if a sketch calls for a 1″ strip, but my flowers are 1 1/2 ” tall, I’ll change the sketch to match my patterned paper.

These cards were a lot of fun to make. I also enjoyed adding a few scraps to decorate the envelopes, as you can see above. I hope that you’ll find time to have a look at the video and that you’re inspired to get creative!

Until next time, may your days be crafty!

Blessings,

Donna